


if you don't believe (it can't hurt you)

by buttonstuck



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst and Feels, I want them to be happy they just won't let me, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Teenager!Steve
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-04-16 10:12:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4621425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttonstuck/pseuds/buttonstuck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It takes him a good while to get around to World War II. The first video he watches is all grainy shots of marching Nazis and Winston Churchill giving speeches and the usual. </p><p>And then they’re talking about Steven Grant Rogers, and Bucky learns that he was a hero."</p><p>Where Bucky wakes up alone in the future, and Steve dies alone in the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. open up

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a little idea I had, because I survive off angst and have no more emotions. Sorry.
> 
> Title is from Graveyard Whistling by Nothing But Thieves.

Hopping from one instant to another is a thing that is impossible to imagine until you’ve experienced it. One moment you’re falling, your stomach dropping even faster and your hair plastered back in the frozen wind. Blink and you’re on a gurney, speeding down a corridor, watching ceiling lights flash by because you can’t move your eyes.

James Buchanan Barnes is not a war hero but they treat him like one. They shoo the press from his hospital bed and doctors tell him it’s the year 2014. It’s probably the second craziest idea he’s ever heard, immediately after the first time Steve told him he planned on enlisting. That thought is funny, because nobody mentions Steve until Bucky’s been off a drip for a week and his head starts clearing.

He hears they picked him from the ice, but he doesn’t remember ice. He remembers snow and falling. They say he was frozen on purpose. He remembers everything up until the impact and tells them they need to give him some time. He holds out hope for the “gotcha” moment, where they pop out from behind fake hospital walls and tell him this is a joke, or at least that he’s still asleep. That would make more sense to his brain than the idea that three weeks ago was really seventy _years_ ago. It’s a science fiction novel come to life, and Bucky was never too keen on reading those.

He tells them he wants to catch up, once it’s been a month and the pain of physical therapy is almost making him believe this isn’t a fever dream. They give him books and historical documentaries. They tell him about the internet but he’s not quite ready for that; he needs to get his brain around atomic bombs and the Cold War and men walking around on the goddamn _moon_ before he’s up for anything else.

It takes him a good while to get around to World War II. The first video he watches is all grainy shots of marching Nazis and Winston Churchill giving speeches and the usual. And then they’re talking about Steven Grant Rogers, and Bucky learns that he was a hero.

A series of vignettes about Rogers’ greatest campaigns. First it’s the night of the ambush. Bucky remembers it like it just happened because in his frozen brain it did. Private Steven Grant Rogers single-handedly saves his platoon from a 20-man German ambush in France. Bucky sees the videos, ones he didn’t even know anyone was taking, where Steve and the Commandos patch together a broken camp the day after. He sees a glimpse of his own face for a few seconds, just another body bustling around in the background. It’s so sterile like this, so removed from the human experience Bucky remembers.

In his mind he can smell the mud and hear the first shouts in the dead of the night. He feels his cot and the leg injury that saved him that night. He hears Steve’s voice and then German and gunshots and there is yelling and he smells the gunpowder and rolls out onto the floor. He crawls on his elbows to the slit opening in the tent and sees nothing. He hears and smells and feels the burst of compression with every gunshot but he can’t see the battle. He never sees Steve duck behind the Jeep with a .22 and scare the living daylights out of the German force. He hears about it later, embellished by the Commandos.

 _But_ , the documentary tells him, _that was just the start of the young Private Rogers’ unexpected tour_. Bucky sees himself more often, always coming in right behind Steve. He’s a background character, dark eyes and hair no match for Steve’s gleaming blond and baby blues. Steve has a tragic backstory and his age (a strappy, illegal seventeen) makes him a martyr. He looks like a golden boy, acts like a superhero, speaks like a gentleman. It hurts deeps in Bucky’s gut. The triumphant music and Steve’s sunlit hair don’t match the memories Bucky has, where Steve is a real human with real emotions. Where he mopes around their apartment for this reason or that, where he can’t hold his liquor so Bucky has to walk him home, where he sketches a figure in his little sketchbook and then draws huge cartoon breasts on top because he was a goddamn teenage boy, not a god in the flesh.

_“For his courageous acts of heroism in the second World War, Private Rogers was posthumously awarded a Medal of Honor by President Truman.”_

And there it is. Bucky doesn’t hear the rest of the documentary, even though it has almost twenty minutes to go. He finally recognizes the pit in his gut, the one that has been there since he became lucid. He swallows around a rock and just watches the pictures flicker in front of him. He knew it would be like this, one way or another. Even if Steve hadn’t died in combat he’d have to be at least ninety now, which was unlikely for someone with his health.

It must have been after Bucky’s fall. He remembers Steve on the train, arm reaching out, falling upwards in the screaming wind as Bucky plummeted down the mountainside. He wonders how long it took Steve to get over him. He wonders if Steve ever cried about him.

Watching these videos gives Bucky a headache. As far as he knew they were a pair. The dynamic duo. Steve and Bucky, Bucky and Steve. Not Great Big Magnificent War Hero Steven Grant Rogers and his childhood sidekick, Sergeant Bucky Barnes, as seen for fifteen seconds in the background. In his heart he knows he was important to Steve, but received history tells him otherwise.

And then he imagines the final battle. He can see it like he’s there, even though he wasn’t. Steve leading the charge, gun in hand, helmet a little floppy on his small head. He follows orders, he goes above and beyond. All without Bucky there. Like he didn’t even matter.

Then again, Steve got shot in the stomach and died in the field without Bucky there. The thought makes him sick to his stomach. He folds in half in his chair, and one arm isn’t enough to wrap around his stomach tight enough to stop the ache.

The act like Steve didn’t exist before the war, like he just popped up wearing a uniform and taking everyone’s punches like a champ. Bucky thinks about their apartment, the one they got right after Steve’s mom died and Bucky was the only place he could go. He remembers being a quiet twenty to Steve’s loud seventeen. He remembers mornings, mostly.

They tell him homosexuality is widely accepted in the States these days, even in the military. For some reason that thought keeps him up just as much as the thought of Steve bleeding out in the grass.

 

* * *

 

“They’ve deemed you a valuable historical resource, Mr. Barnes.”

Bucky takes a breath and caps it with a sharp throat clearing. “I bet they have.”

Sharon shifts a little in her seat. “What that means is that everyone and their mother wants to talk with you,” she continues. “The historians have won out against the scientists, at least, so you’re looking at more interviews than experiments.”

“Just tell me where to go.”

Sharon smiles a little to herself. “You know they’ll ask you about Private Rogers.”

Bucky purses his lips and lets his eyes wander around the small office. “No surprises there. From what I hear Steve’s the new George Washington.”

Sharon doesn’t dispute that. “You knew him personally.”

“Met him once or twice.” At least now he can picture Steve without smelling gunpowder.

“You lived with him.”

“Once or twice.”

“You’re a war hero, Mr. Barnes. World War II vets are becoming scarce. Memory deteriorates. Yours is the freshest we have.”

There’s a pause. “What if I’d never met Steve?” Bucky asks. “What if I was just some other gun? Are they looking for a war story or a Steve Rogers story?”

“You’d still be an asset,” Sharon replies. “And what you say is up to you.”

“Good.” Bucky settles himself back in the armchair like he hadn’t been sprawled out before. “’Cause I’m not gonna give any spiel about how much of a hero he is. I can’t give anybody a fancy historical analysis any more than one of your Afghanistan vets can.”

“We realize.”

“Is that the royal ‘we’? Who do you work for?”

Sharon watches him for a second. “Someone who is on your side.”

Bucky narrows his eyes but keeps his posture nonchalant. “Didn’t know we were dealing in sides here.”

“Then let’s not,” Sharon says, and Bucky gets the sense he won’t get far on the subject. "How is your arm?”

“Must’ve misplaced it,” Bucky quips. He glances down at his sagging left sleeve. “Let me know if you find it.”

Sharon smiles and visibly relaxes. “We’re thinking of getting you a prosthesis, if that’s a direction you want to go.”

“Better no arm than a wooden one, ma’am.”

“You underestimate modern medicine. Nowadays prosthetics can hook up to your nerves. You’d be able to control it.”

“It makes for a better story, then. Metal soldier from the past,” Bucky laughs a little. “Don’t think you need to spend all that on me. I’m a low-maintenance man.”

“You kept running on ice for seventy years. I don’t doubt it.”

Bucky decides that, despite her secrets, Sharon is just fine. “So when do you release me on the world?” he asks.

“Your psychiatric evaluations have turned out fine. You’ve made great progress in your physical therapy. You may need to get up to speed on computers but that’s nothing you won’t pick up fast,” Sharon says. “We might let you loose next week. Don’t quote me on that.”

Bucky sighs, nodding a little to himself. “So I’ll be free to go wherever I want?”

“You’ll have a chaperone.”

“Babysitter,” Bucky corrects, but it’s with a smile.

“Where do you want to go?”

Bucky shrugs even though he knows exactly where he wants to go, where he’s been itching to go for a while now. “Where’s Steve?”

Sharon smiles. “Arlington,” she answers, like she knew what he was going to ask before he did. “We’ll fly you there.”

Bucky tries to look unfazed but his chest feels tight again. He looks out the window like it’s a television. “Great. Um. Is he…he’s actually there? If we go there and I go up to his…I’ll be six feet away from him. Is what I’m asking.”

“His body wasn’t recovered,” Sharon says, and Bucky’s glad she didn’t dance around saying it, even if it makes him queasy. “No.”

“Right. Of course. Just adds to the mystique, huh?” A missing body makes all sorts of stupid things go through Bucky’s head. Steve would be ninety. Steve would be dead. Steve is dead.

He’d say that thinking like that is a shock, but it’s just a repetition of the mantra he’s been whispering to himself for a long time. It’s all starting to feel like much longer ago. More like seventy years than a few months. A blessing and a curse.

“Thanks,” he finally decides to say.

 

* * *

 

They do ask him about Steve. They ask him a lot about Steve, and he tells them. He tells them about the punks in the alleys who beat Steve’s face in. He tells them about Steve’s mother and how it took Steve a full week after she passed before he finally broke down and Bucky held him until he stopped crying and it was time for breakfast. He tells them about the apartment, and their landlord, and how Steve caught a mouse once when he was fifteen and named it after the mayor.

They want to ask him about the war, and Bucky is just as fine talking about that as anything else.

“I didn’t even know he’d managed to get into the army until he got me out of that camp,” Bucky says more times than he counts. “Thought I was a goner until I saw his little face pulling me out of the fire. I still don’t know how he managed to pick me up, to be honest, with how scrawny he still was. It’s a miracle nobody managed to figure him out, thinking on it. He looked even younger than he was sometimes.”

They eat it up. He reads some of the interviews and laughs at how they embellish him. It’s amazing how they seem to remember the “tearful gleam” in his eyes when he talks about Steve when he doesn’t remember it himself. He reads a tabloid that tries to report about his “illicit gay affair” with Steve but it’s short-lived and he finds himself able to think it’s funny.

It feels like recovery, which is what they tell him it is.

 

* * *

 

Bucky can’t feel his fingers and he’s not sure how long it’s been since he took a full breath. He’s plastered against the back of the couch in his small apartment, trying to stop his heart because it’s pumping so fast it feels like a hum. He might throw up and he might pass out.

_“Barnes?”_

He slaps the phone to his ear. “Say that again,” he whispers.

_“Don’t go crazy, now. There’s still no hard evidence it’s him—”_

This is not actually possible. There is no way in every circle of hell (heaven? Then why is he panicking?) this is actually possible. “Pick me up,” he breathes. “Come get me right now or I’m fucking walking there.”

Natasha clears her throat on the other end of the line. _“We can’t just fly to the arctic, Barnes.”_

“I’ll fly the plane myself,” Bucky snaps.

_“Barnes—”_

Bucky hops up from the couch, suddenly energized. His hand is shaking as he pulls his coat from the back of a chair and pulls it on so fast his sleeve bunches up to his elbow inside. He remembers at the last second to grab his wallet before he’s out the door, phone still on but in his hand.

He puts it back to his ear as he skips the steps by threes on the way down to the lobby of the apartment building.

“I’m coming to you. I’ll be there in five,” he says. The subway will take too long so he just pockets his phone and breaks into a sprint.

He nearly gets hit as he dashes across streets and weaves around people. He can’t even hear his own thoughts.

_“They found a body. They think they found him.”_

* * *

 

When they get to the excavation site the crew already has a block of ice out of the ground. Bucky doesn’t listen to any of their warnings when he pushes past the meager security and sprints across the ice.

He sees a hand first and knows. He knows it’s Steve before he even sees the face, eyes closed and shadowed behind the warped ice. A hunk of metal curls around him—the cockpit of the plane had to be dug out with him because it’s _though_ him. Bucky sits down on the ice and can’t hear anything anyone is saying when they ask him to get up, to leave.

He doesn’t leave, and when he doesn’t move they don’t make him. He follows the block when they load it into a temperature-controlled van, and he sits with it and a couple scientists in the cold as they transport it.

This isn’t what they call recovery. This is addiction.

They argue about how to thaw him. Bucky stands by in the lab while they bicker and sits by the ice. He wanted to be six feet away but now he can be less than two. He can put a glove on the ice and then he’s crying in his chair.

Steve looks so young.

Younger than Bucky remembers him, even if it’s only been nine months. He cries because he realizes that the documentaries had gotten him, and when he sees Steve’s face through the ice he sees a hero before he sees a boy.

They don’t let him stay for the thawing, once they figure out how it should be done. Bucky suggests a hairdryer as a joke but it drops to the floor like a weight and he tries not to throw up. So instead he sits in a waiting room like it’s surgery. Interns bring him food and he’s not too sick to eat.

When he tries to picture it he sees a metal table and a skinny body, white from the cold and the years. They’re damn well going to have a funeral. A full military funeral like the one Steve never properly got. They’re going to put his body on top of a flag and Bucky will lead the salute and they’ll understand how much this kid mattered. There will be roses and twenty-one guns and Steve will have won them the whole goddamn war for all they’ll know.

It’s been innumerable hours so he isn’t prepared for the alarms or the running. He sees lab coats dashing around like white mice and he stands. He asks questions, demands answers, but no one can tell him anything he understands. And then there are sirens outside and they’re yelling to clear the way, because a few seconds later a stretcher is rushing into the building and down the hall.

Bucky runs to the room but there are already too many people inside and they’re trying to get security to clear them away. He gets pushed to the wayside and all he sees is a shock of blond hair and a bright red neck brace and he can’t breathe.

 

* * *

 

So Steve is alive.

 

* * *

 

The hospital is a shitshow. Bucky is in a waiting room again but the press is there too. They ask him questions he can’t answer and he manages not to punch anyone. The intensive care unit is on lockdown. Steve is alive.

Bucky gets updates every hour or so, and each time a doctor walks out he expects them to tell him they’re sorry. Instead, he gets

12:42am – Breathing. Hypothermic

1:38am – Fever

3:04am – Temperature has peaked

3:45am – Fever breaking

5am – Vitals approaching normal

6am – Comatose

7am – Comatose

8am – Comatose

Bucky knows how he himself survived. He’s been told how cryogenic storage works, and how carefully he’d been controlled until they’d found him. That was a part of his history he found uneasy—they didn’t know who found him on the mountain, who was keeping him, and why. But they knew, for the most part, _how_ he’d survived.

Steve is a miracle child, like he’s always been, like he always will be. Physics and biology took a sick day and left somebody alive in a hunk of ice for seventy years like it wasn’t a big deal. 

The thing that keeps Bucky awake even when his eyes droop is the one question he still has the gall to ask. Why did they find him there? Everyone knows Steve died in Germany. So why did they find him in a plane, frozen in the Arctic Circle? What did he do after he died?

 

* * *

 

They all know who Bucky is, so they let him in in lieu of family. There, lying on a bed, hooked up to more than one drip and stuck with all kinds of tubes, Steve looks like he’s sleeping. Take away the fluorescent lights and the tubes and he might as well be down with pneumonia in their apartment in 1939. He looks smaller than Bucky remembers. Then again, Bucky is bigger than he remembers being when he fell.

Bucky doesn’t know quite what to do with himself. He scoots a chair over to Steve’s side and searches for small, chilly hand. Under the blanket Bucky can see Steve’s chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm. It is relaxing in a way Bucky never imagined he could feel. It feels like he’s going to wake up in his bed in the apartment Sharon’s organization found him. Like he’s going to head out for physical therapy in the morning. Like none of this is real.

Suddenly Steve makes a sound, a harsh breath followed by a watery cough. Bucky’s eyes fly wide and he searches Steve’s face. Nothing. He pretends not to notice how his shoulders fall a little.

“I’m here for you, bud,” he whispers, mostly for himself. “I’m gonna be here as long as you need me.”

There were so many infuriating uncertainties. Bucky was the only case study the world had for being frozen and thawed, and he’d been temperature controlled. He’d been in a tube and someone who knew what they were doing had pulled switches and typed in numbers. His had been science. Steve was chance.

Bucky walks around outside when he can’t sit anymore. He doesn’t know very many people in the future but he calls one of the guys from the VA, a kid named Sam Wilson who leads some support groups. It’s about an hour before Sam actually gets there, but Bucky’s sense of time is warped. He doesn’t mind much of anything anymore.

“You look like shit,” Sam says as he walks up the sidewalk to where Bucky sits on the curb. Bucky knows how greasy his hair is—he can feel it. He hasn’t been eating very well lately either.

“Thanks, man. You look great,” he replies, “Fit.”

Sam gives a quiet smile Bucky can’t parse. “How’s he doing?”

“Good, all things considered,” Bucky sighs. So many things have been wearing on his mind and though he doesn’t want to treat Sam like a therapist he needs to talk. He stands with some effort. “How’s a walk sound?”

“Fine by me.”

They start down the sidewalk. Bucky doesn’t know where they’re going, but he has so much energy built up in his gut that he needs to work off. He tucks his hand in his pocket with an uncomfortable force. “It’s crazy to me that they can keep him alive like that. With all those tubes and everything. They could probably keep him going forever, huh?”

“Probably.”

“But that’s also…he could be gone. I read up on it and he could be stuck like this. Or when he wakes up his brain could be shot. Plus his body’s a mess and they don’t know if his digestive system will even work by itself, or if he’d ever be able to move by himself.”

“That’s all possible,” Sam says. Bucky glances over at him.

“I just hate not knowing, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Sam replies. “But you have to realize that you _won’t_ know until you do.”

“Gee, thanks. Couldn’t’a figured out that one.”

“Right now there isn’t anything you can do for him. It’s shitty and it’s the truth.”

Bucky’s angry, but not really at Sam. “Fuck that,” he spits without any fire. “I can’t just sit next to him and think him awake.” He doesn’t speak for a long moment. “I talk to him every day,” he continues, softer. “All the time. If he can hear me he oughta know I’m there. I don’t like leaving very long.”

“You feel helpless,” Sam says. Bucky hates therapist-speak but can’t do much when it hits the nail on the head.

“There was always something I could do,” Bucky says quietly. Sam doesn’t respond. “I could get him a blanket. Or a towel. And sometimes we thought he was going to die but he never did.”

There’s a silence where Bucky feels that directionless energy bubbling up in his throat. He wants to break something. They’ve stopped walking. Sam looks at him delicately and puts a careful hand on his shoulder. “You know what you can do?”

Bucky looks up with a weary skepticism.

“You aren’t okay right now,” Sam says. “But if Steve wakes up he will need you. And the only way you can help him is if you aren’t working through your own shit at the same time.”

Bucky scowls. Sam tightens his grip on Bucky’s arm.

“It doesn’t matter how he comes out. It doesn’t matter if he’s the same person as before, or if he isn’t, or if he can’t open his eyes and breathes through tube forever. It _doesn’t matter_ , because if you care about him as much as it looks like you do, you will be there for him as he is.” Sam’s eyes are strong but there’s a softness behind them. “Not how you wish he’d be.”

There are birds chirping and Bucky can hear his own heart.

He doesn’t quite absorb the words until they’re done with the walk and he’s back in Steve’s room. He’s watching Steve’s closed eyes when the profundity of it hits him. His eyes widen and his eyes trail down to the veiled blue veins on the back of Steve’s hand. He picks it up and thinks, maybe out loud, _I’m here for you, Stevie._

 _Whoever you end up being_.

He cries into the blankets on Steve’s hip until he falls asleep.


	2. and shut it back down

Bucky wasn’t there when Steve died. He wasn’t there when they found Steve in the ice. He wasn’t there when they thawed Steve, or when they figured out he was alive. So it makes sense that he isn’t around when Steve opens his eyes for the first time in seventy years.

After a week and a half of sleepless overnight stays the hospital finally suggested Bucky go home (kicked him out, he thinks) and Bucky is sitting on the couch in his apartment watching TV when they call him and tell him Steve has opened his eyes and appears to be minimally responsive.

It takes fifteen minutes to get to the hospital in a cab, but it only takes Bucky eleven to get there on foot. He makes it in ten and still has enough in him to dash up the stairs. There are doctors, maybe two or three of them, coming in and out of Steve’s room. Bucky dashes for the door and pauses to catch his breath for the first time only when he sees Steve’s face.

His eyes are closed and for a moment Bucky has a panicky thought that maybe he imagined the phone call. Maybe Steve isn’t awake. But then the nurse comes over and explains that Steve opened his eyes just a little while ago and moved his arm up to his nose to try and tug on the tubes. He went back under but this might be it, she says. He might be on the road to waking up for good.

Bucky claims the chair by Steve’s bed and cannot be moved. The first time he sees it—Steve lazily blinking his eyes open, taking a bigger breath, and shifting in the bed, he freezes. It happens a second time, Steve’s eyes scanning the room absently for a few minutes. Bucky doesn’t breathe. He whispers to Steve almost nonstop and rubs the back of his hand.

The third time Bucky sees Steve awake he’s talking about some trip they took to Queens to see a friend in 1937. There was a dog and Steve got so excited, like he was ten years old again. Steve’s eyes open slowly, but soon a bit wider than before. His head turns just enough that he can get Bucky’s face. Bucky’s eyes lock with Steve’s and Bucky feels like the floor has dropped out from under him. He’s sure Steve is looking at him, _seeing_ him. He can’t feel his body.

“Stevie,” he says quietly. 

There’s a moment and then a small, childlike smile brushes the corners of Steve’s lips. “Hey, Buck,” he says. His voice is raspy and tiny, and it’s the greatest sound Bucky has ever heard. He coughs out a laugh and he’s probably crying.

“Hey, Stevie, you’re okay,” he says. “I’m gonna call in some people to take a look at you but you’re great, buddy. You’re a good kid, you know. The best.” He knows he’s speaking nonsense but he doesn’t care.

They come in and ask Steve some questions. What his name is. What his birthday is. What his home address is (was). Steve remembers the street but not the building number, the day of the week his last birthday was but not the month. His voice is sore from disuse but Bucky hangs on every word.

When Steve goes back to sleep Bucky calls Sam, doesn’t get a response, and then calls Natasha. She’s visiting relatives in Russia and he doesn’t actually know what time of day it is for her, but she answers like she was already awake so it must be okay.

“He said my name,” Bucky says over and over. Natasha listens like the good friend she is while Bucky retells the story for himself. “He looked at me and said my name and I think he’s going to be okay.”

* * *

 “So I hear it’s the future,” Steve says when Bucky walks into the hospital room a week later, in the early morning. There’s a strange look on his face, like he’s ready for it to be a joke but scared it isn’t.

Bucky stops in his tracks, watching Steve’s face. Then he takes a long breath and shrugs. “Yeah.”

“So.”

“Throws you for a loop, I know,” Bucky says.

“Not the strangest thing that’s ever happened,” Steve tries, but then his nerves must take over because he barks out a laugh. “Nope, yeah, this is it. This probably takes the cake for strangest thing that’s ever happened.”

“To anyone,” Bucky agrees. His eyes run over Steve’s tiny frame under the blanket and he feels a smile nudging at his lips. All at once a rush of overwhelming mirth and sadness floods his chest. Steve understands just how strange it actually is. Bucky isn’t alone in this. There is someone else who can even begin to comprehend what his life in the past half year has been like, the cognitive dissonance he’s been trying to survive. Bucky giggles despite himself. Steve’s eyes light up in that way that makes Bucky’s chest ache but then he’s giggling a little too.

“What’s got you so tickled?” Steve asks.

“Life,” Bucky says, rubbing at his eyes and letting out a groan before dissolving into more small, happy-sad laughter. He crosses the room and pulls over the guest chair, twisting it around and straddling it backwards. Steve still has some trouble moving but he can turn his head wherever he wants. Their eyes meet for a long moment, and Bucky feels like he must be showing off every single emotion all at once. “Hey, Steve,” he finally says.

“Hey, Buck.”

“Glad you decided to show up,” Bucky continues. “It was getting awful lonely.”

“Did you think I was dead?” Steve asks plainly.

“Mm,” Bucky hums, turning his eyes down to the linoleum. “Wasn’t fun. I wouldn’t recommend it.” The floor is speckled with gray and blue.

“I know,” Steve says, but now it’s quiet.

Bucky glances back up and Steve is staring at the ceiling. “You don’t have to tell me, Bucky. I watched you fall.”

“Then I guess we’re even,” Bucky says with a smile. “You know what I’m maddest about, though? What really grinds my gears?”

Steve snorts. “You’re gonna tell me either way.”

“There aren’t any flying cars. Not a one. Men on the moon, sure, phones without wires, sure. But Stark couldn’t even find a goddamn market for flying cars.”

Steve laughs at that. “When did we get to the moon?”

“Sixty-something. By the way, all these new years sound like they’re made up, don’t they? No respectable year starts with ‘two thousand,’” Bucky continues, throwing his hands in the air. “You and me, we’re practically ninety by now. And don’t even get me _started_ on music. Everything we know is called ‘oldies’ now, and instead of singing you got people just talking on top of computer drums.”

“You sound like your grandpa,” Steve jabs with a laugh. Bucky grimaces.

“I’m just saying, I don’t know what’s gotten into kids these days…”

Steve is laughing more and that just keeps Bucky going. He rants about politics, how you don’t even have to write out arithmetic anymore, how bananas taste wrong, and how every single movie is in color. He doesn’t care what he says as long as it keeps the smile on Steve’s face. God, he’d do anything to keep that smile forever.

They fall into comfortable silence for a while, but then Steve sighs from somewhere deep inside himself. He picks up a corner of his blanket and starts fiddling with the material. His smile turns sad. Bucky watches him and waits.

“So, my legs, huh?”

Bucky’s stomach knots up. “When did they tell you?”

“I knew something was funny the whole time, but I thought maybe it was gonna come back. You don’t notice so much when you _can’t_ feel something, you know?”

“They’ve got all sorts of fixes nowadays, you know,” Bucky says. “Maybe not to walk, but you can get around.”

“Just don’t put me in an institution,” Steve jokes.

“They don’t make those anymore, I don’t think,” Bucky replies. “But hey, you look chipper.”

“Guess I gotta wait for it to sink in, you know?” Steve says with a little sigh. “Never was much of a runner.”

“Darn, there goes your baseball career.”

Steve laughs and slaps Bucky on the shoulder. It sends a rush of energy into Bucky’s chest and he grins.

“I’m not so sure I’m liking the future all that much,” Steve says, “Based on your description. Let’s go back.”

“Don’t I wish,” Bucky says, and he’s suddenly struck by how much he means it.

“I’m glad that if I had to wake up all loopy in the future, though,” Steve says, “you’re here to suffer through it with me too.”

“Me too, you skinny little punk.”

Steve smiles, and Bucky thinks that it might just be all right, just maybe.

* * *

Bucky met Natasha either the first or second week he was awake. She came in with a ponytail and bright sneakers and asked him to push his foot against her hand. That was, he would find, the easiest physical therapy would get.

Natasha wasn’t a perky personality by any means. Her standards were high and unyielding, even on bad days where Bucky didn’t feel like getting out of bed and everything hurt. But something about her was reassuring. Nurses were condescending and doctors were absent—Natasha didn’t bribe Bucky with “I believe in you!”-type platitudes. She acted as though she knew he could do it already and was annoyed that he wasn’t.

That kind of touch worked for Bucky, who was still unconsciously accustomed to the rigor of drills and the military atmosphere. It wasn’t long before he was up and walking, a bit longer before he had the full range of motion in his arm, but by their last session Bucky and Natasha had done enough talking that he considered her a friend. At the close of their doctor-patient relationship Bucky asked if she’d like to get coffee sometime. She said she had a long-term live-in boyfriend, and Bucky said he could come too.

“So where’s the lump?”

“Coffee” had become a weekly occurrence.

Natasha rolls her eyes and takes a small sip of her tea. “Sick. He was up half of last night with his head in the toilet. Lucky slept on the bath mat and whined every time Clint threw up.” She watches a group walk outside the café window. “I slept very well. I’d almost feel guilty but I’m sure he liked his four-legged babysitter better than me. Anyway, he says hi.”

Bucky snorts. “ _Hi._ No offense, but if I were sick I’d probably prefer the dog too.”

“Oh, none taken. I’d be terrible. I’m bad at pity.”

“Hey, I can’t complain. That’s the reason I’m not using a bed pan.”

Natasha’s eyebrows bounce and she gives a small smile. “How does it feel, being the world’s first one-armed, walking fossil?”

“I get the best of both worlds,” Bucky says as he shakes his head. “All the crabbiness of an old man without the senior citizen restaurant discounts. Speaking of which, those are new. Unless you count the one time Steve dressed up for Halloween.” There’s a pause, and Bucky sighs. “Fuck.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Great. As well as he could be.”

“That could mean anything,” Natasha says, never one for flighty answers.

“He’s talking,” Bucky says. “Not much. Here and there. He’s only got, uh, certain visiting hours. Which is most of the day anyway, but now and then they make me go home. It’s either that or roll in a second bed for me, y’know.”

Natasha smiles at that, and it looks genuine. “That’s great.” She swirls her coffee stirrer and then takes a sip through it. Ever since Bucky learned that those weren’t actually tiny straws he’d wondered whether she was still using it as one just to humor him.

“Hey, looks like I missed the party!”

Bucky’s head darts up to see a bright-eyed Sam approaching, a big paper cup in his hand and a black backpack on one shoulder. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything serious.”

Bucky finds that he’s able to give Sam a real, big grin. “Sit down. Just a little coffee for me and the missus.”

“Please,” Natasha cuts in, “If we were a thing you know you’d end up taking my last name.”

Bucky shrugs. Sam pulls over a chair from an adjacent table and hooks the straps of his backpack on the back. He sits down with a bit of effort and winces, maybe just a bit dramatically for effect.

“Better watch that back,” Bucky jabs.

“My hip’s gonna get me first,” Sam groans. “Knocked it completely out of place this morning. I don’t even know what I did but it’s still giving me trouble even though I’m pretty sure everything important’s back where it’s supposed to be.” Then he turns to Natasha with a hand. “Sam Wilson. I work at the VA. Tell me to leave when you get sick of me.”

Natasha rolls her eyes but introduces herself in a similar fashion. “Natasha. Physical therapist. I’m the reason this specimen can walk.”

“Hey, I’d have done just fine on my own. I even got one less limb to worry about than most people.”

“Honestly, the simpler the better. You’d have a hard time working two arms at the same time.”

“Ha, ha. I hope you got a back up career, because most people learned how to walk on their own just fine the first time.”

“How does it feel, to know that you were worse than a baby at something?”

“Welp,” Sam says suddenly, a perplexed look on his face. Bucky turns to him and after a second of silence mirrors the look. “Didn’t realize the date I was crashing wasn’t gonna have subtitles.”

Bucky blinks a few times but is ready to be in on the joke. “What?”

“Sorry,” Natasha interjects fluidly, relaxing her shoulders. “Habit. We can switch over.”

Bucky looks back and forth between the other two. “I’m missing something.”

Sam laughs out loud, but it’s not mean. “Been a while since I brushed up on my Russian. Or Bulgarian or Portuguese or whatever. I’m not a language expert.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Bucky asks with a snort.

“It’s true, we were being a bit rude,” Natasha says. Her look is pointed when Bucky’s eyes snap over to her and there’s something well-hidden in her expression. She looks calculated, maybe guarded. “We can use English.”

Bucky is thoroughly confused, and he’s not really enjoying it. “That’s what we’ve _been_ using,” he says firmly.

“Not a hundred percent sure that’s true, man,” Sam says, and he must notice the sudden tension in the air because his voice isn’t as free. He shifts a little in his chair.

Bucky raises his eyebrows and waits for the punchline. “I don’t speak Russian either,” he says. Sam is starting to look concerned. “I know maybe…three words in German, and I pretended to learn French one time. Can’t speak it for shit.” Then, for emphasis, “I speak English.”

There’s a pause that’s a little too long. Bucky doesn’t see the look Natasha shoots Sam, and he doesn’t notice anything wrong in the sudden affable grin Sam plasters on his face.

“You trying to pick up girls in France?” Sam asks, and the moment is broken. Bucky blinks in surprise but barks out a laugh.

“We thought it made us a better pick than the other guys,” Bucky says, “Coulda learned Swahili for all it mattered, cause all the girls in the GI bars spoke English anyway.”

“You guys thought you had game, huh?” Sam quips. Bucky waggles his eyebrows.

Natasha smiles along with the conversation but is silent for a long time.

* * *

That’s one of the cracks that begins to form, starting slowly in the periphery of Bucky’s life and winding its way into the background where it can’t be seen. There’s a shift in the air, and Bucky wonders if he’s the only one who feels it. He must be. Maybe it’s Steve.

Bucky’s in the room when Steve has his first seizure. One moment everything fine—Bucky has been doing less and less of the talking. When he does it’s mostly because the way Steve looks at him when he’s talking is worth every word. It’s just how Steve gives his attention normally, like the person he’s looking at is the most absorbing thing he’s ever seen. The intensity in his eyes is something that Bucky remembers clearly from Brooklyn.

That’s what Bucky calls the past. Brooklyn. Maybe he’ll go back someday.

At first it doesn’t seem like anything is really wrong, because even though Steve’s head is turned all the way to the side he’s just staring, almost like he’s trying to look into the pillow.

“Stevie?”

Nothing, and then a sharp groan. Bucky’s heart leaps into his throat so fast the adrenaline gives him whiplash. “Steve,” he says strongly, trying to cover his fear.

There’s only a few seconds between the groan and the start of the convulsions. Steve’s arms suddenly jerk up into his chest and his knees lift off the bed, pulling the sheet up with them. The remote that controls the inclination of his bed falls off the plastic arm and clatters on the floor, still held by the cable connecting it to the motor. Steve’s head turns almost too far to the side and shakes violently.

The floor drops out from under Bucky’s feet and everything is at once muffled and distant. Bucky fumbles for the emergency call button in slow motion and reaches for Steve, whose arm flies out to the side and smacks into the side of the bed. The tension pushes the right side of his back up off the mattress and he turns almost on his side. Bucky’s entire body is weighed down with complete helplessness, blind panic, emptiness.

It’s a combination that leaves Bucky numb where he should be feeling too much. Nurses come in and Bucky stumbles out of the way while they maneuver Steve onto his side as well as they can without dislocating his arms. It’s probably only about two minutes but it seems like forever before the convulsions begin to die down, and soon Steve is just lying there, breaths wet and harsh, almost like growls.

“What’s wrong?” Bucky chokes out.

“Looks like a seizure,” one of the nurses says. Then, to the other nurses, “When he’s done let’s get him on a Lorazepam drip, 2mL.”

“He doesn’t have epilepsy,” Bucky hears himself saying. Nobody listens because what does it matter?

Bucky isn’t sure he can feel his hands. They say something about an “M-R-I,” and while the acronym is familiar Bucky can’t remember what it was. It’s the helplessness that’s the worst, the feeling that he can do absolutely nothing except stay out of the way.

Another part of him, the darker part, is thinking that of course this would happen. It was too perfect. At some point, something had to give.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back.   
> Future updates will not be so few or far between.


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